Tuesday, August 30, 2016

It’s Not My Dog, He Didn’t Bite You, And Besides You Kicked Him First

In this age of specialization we look to the experts to tell us what to think. And when it comes to origins, the experts tell us that life evolved. Random mutations, surprisingly enough, are sufficient to create the species. As if we needed another example of this, we now have “Professor B,” who wishes to remain anonymous but can’t help to explain that skeptics of this modern day Epicureanism are “almost certainly wrong” to doubt that proteins can spontaneously arise because it would require something like 10^74 attempts. After all, that figure was “based on a very small sample.” Small sample? If the professor understood statistics he would know small sample sizes do not invalidate results—not to the level he requires. In fact, as we have discussed many times, several studies have arrived at this type of astronomical figure.

When presented with that inconvenient fact, our Professor B switched strategies. Now, it seems that, according to the professor, “a very large number of different amino acid sequences were capable of performing the same biological function.” Therefore it is not a big problem for evolution to create these incredible molecular machines.

That is an absurd misrepresentation of molecular biology. While it certainly is true that a large number of different sequences can perform the same function, we are nowhere close to 10^74. “Very large” in this context is astronomically smaller than 10^74.

As if sensing a problem, Professor B switched to yet another tactic, claiming that evolution is capable of creating astronomical numbers of proteins anyway. It seems, according to the professor, that evolution can rip through 10^42 different proteins in search of what works.

Not that this helps much, as 10^42 is still dozens of orders of magnitude smaller than the needed 10^74. But even the estimate of 10^42 is, itself, absurd. It comes from a paper that assumes the pre existence of bacteria and, yes, proteins. In fact, the evolutionists assumed the earth was covered with bacteria, and each bacteria was full of proteins. That of course is not an appropriate assumption for the question of how proteins could have evolved in the first place. In fact, it is circular. Good thing the professor remained anonymous.